U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, five cabinet secretaries, and 25 congressional Republicans fanned out across the country yesterday to try to bolster public support for the Bush administration’s drill-based energy plan. Now that fuel costs are falling and fuel supplies are rising, the administration has taken to describing the current energy situation in the country as a “challenge,” rather than a “crisis” — and it is attempting to wrap itself in a green flag. “Conservation is a must,” Lynne Cheney told an audience in Philadelphia, speaking for her husband, who was suffering from laryngitis. (Recall that last April, the veep belittled conservation as nothing more than “a sign of personal virtue.) Meanwhile, Cheney is asking that the U.S. Navy, rather than the vice president’s office, pay the $186,000 annual bill to heat and light his official home in Washington, D.C.
